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| 2020 novel of ideas about addressing climate change & other forms of environmental degradation |
The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation.
Some who need to lose a dozen pounds to attain what they perceive as their ideal weight and health might do fine just by cutting back on the more obviously fattening foods and the carbohydrates they contain—for instance, sugary beverages, beer (“shun beer as if it were the plague,” wrote Brillat-Savarin), desserts, and sweet snacks. These folks will do fine eating slow carbs, with their complement of fiber to slow digestion and absorption and keep insulin levels low. Rigid abstinence will not be necessary for them.
The first step in developing our capacity for Faculty X [Colin Wilson's concept of a melding right & left brain functions for a more complete appreciation of reality], then, is to create a sense of optimism—not about anything in particular, but a general sense that life means well by us, what Jean Gebser called “primal trust.” And this leads naturally to the next step, developing a sense of purpose. After we stop sending our right brain messages of doom, the next step is to foster a sense of interest. Mystics and poets tell us that we live in a fascinating universe, a cosmos of such complexity that it seems unthinkable anyone could be bored in it. Yet this is exactly what happens.
The same may be said of any symbolic form, of language, art, or myth, in that each of these is a particular way of seeing, and carries within itself its particular and proper source of light. The function of envisagement, the dawn of a conceptual enlightenment can never be realistically derived from things themselves or understood through the nature of its objective contents. For it is not a question of what we see in a certain perspective, but of the perspective itself.
What really did happen? [Referring to altruistic student movements in the 60s and early 70s for social welfare & in politics.] As I see it, for the first time in a very long while a spontaneous political movement arose which not only did not simply carry on propaganda, but acted, and, moreover, acted almost exclusively from moral motives. Together with this moral factor, quite rare in what is usually considered a mere power or interest play, another experience new for our time entered the game of politics: It turned out that acting is fun. This generation discovered what the eighteenth century had called “public happiness,” which means that when man takes part in public life he opens up for himself a dimension of human experience that otherwise remains closed to him and that in some way constitutes a part of complete “happiness.”
Psychology, depth psychology or psychoanalysis, discovers no more than the ever-changing moods, the ups and downs of our psychic life, and its results and discoveries are neither particularly appealing nor very meaningful in themselves. “Individual psychology,” on the other hand, the prerogative of fiction, the novel and the drama, can never be a science; as a science it is a contradiction in terms.
It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.
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